Yo La Tengo
There's A Riot Going On

Continuing with this latest album set to release on March 16th via Matador Records, the unstoppable decline of Yo La Tengo, comprised of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew, persists. Even in the case of "Fade" in 2013, John McEntire's production wasn't enough to save the band from indie-pop collapse (an admittedly unfortunate change, seeing as it was the first album in twenty years not produced by Roger Moutenot). In this case, the historic band from Hoboken, New Jersey, manages to do even worse.

From this perspective, the title "There's A Riot Going On" can easily be described as a sort of fraud. The album aims to simultaneously pay homage to Sly and The Family Stone, who released an eponymous album in 1971 during a particularly tumultuous political time in the USA, and become a sort of social and political manifesto reflecting those themes, adapted to the current geopolitical situation in North America and the entire Western world. How this album could constitute something capable of conveying such content remains a mystery.

The problem with "There's A Riot Going On," however, isn't that it's a bad album but rather its overall pointlessness: Yo La Tengo has now settled into a compositional model that constitutes a kind of practice teetering between certain abstract pop and reassuring low-intensity indie sounds devoid of any bite, liveliness, or zest. Between faltering alternative ballads like "Shades Of Blue," "For You Too," "Ashes," or "What Chance Have I Got," some experimentalism like the minimalist ambient "Shortwave" and the low-fidelity "Japanese" music in "You Are Here" and "Let's Do It Wrong," up to the bossa nova and calypso sounds of "Polynesia," "Esportes Casual," "Forever," and incomprehensible episodes like "Out Of The Pool," the album sounds like a worn-out tape played to exhaustion inside an old, poor-quality VCR dating back to the time of the First Gulf War, which eventually stops working because it just can't anymore. It's a pity because live, these three "kids" still have a lot to say, but if you want to hear something truly powerful on record, then go back to the legendary Sly Stone's album and treat yourself to a jolt of life.